From: Imponderables - The Solution to
Mysteries
of Everyday Life.
by David Feldman, William Morrow and Co., NY, NY, 1987
Presented with permission of the author. To purchase this book go to: www.imponderables.com

If you engage in a war, folks at the home front want to know the body
counts.
Throw a parade or a riot, and people want crowd estimates. It's human
nature
to want to judge the failure or success of an enterprise by quantifying
it.

The unenviable task of making crowd estimates usually falls on
the
local
police department, and parades are usually the occasions for these
estimates.
The most famous parade in the United States, the Tournament of Roses
parade,
held in Pasadena, California, every New Year's Day, has, since 1930,
consistently
estimated its attendance at from I to 1.5 million. The Pasadena police
would be quite happy not to make crowd estimates, but the press needs
figures
(it just doesn't sound right to start a newspaper story about the
parade
by saying, "A whole bunch of people showed up in Pasadena . . ."), and
politicians need to measure the success of the parade in order to boast
of their accomplishment.

But how are these estimates made? Imagine the logistical
nightmare
of
trying to count heads at a ticker tape parade in lower Manhattan, with
its asymmetrical streets, floating debris (obscuring vision), and the
staggering
numbers involved.

For several years, Michael Guerin, the special events public
information
officer for the City of Pasadena, has had the responsibility of
figuring
out the attendance at the Tournament of Roses parade. Guerin flies over
the parade site in a helicopter. Obviously, he doesn't count heads.
From
his years of experience, he knows what 104,000 people look like bunched
up together, for that is the capacity of the Rose Bowl, home of the
football
institution that follows the parade. Using the Rose Bowl crowd as a
benchmark,
Guerin tries to conceptualize the 100,000+ people he has seen in the
circular
stadium into the linear crowd along the parade route. This can't be a
precise
measurement; after all, the parade route spans exactly five and a half
miles, and he must also count spectators who look at the floats in the
formation areas, where they are assembled, as well as the post-parade
area
where the floats are put on display.

Since the population of Pasadena is well under 200,000, local
officials
are used to skepticism about their estimates of 1,000,000 plus
spectators,
and were challenged in 1983 by Peter Apanel, founder of the Doo-Dah
parade,
a spoof of the Tournament of Roses parade. Dubious about official
estimates,
Apanel commissioned photographers to shoot 442 sequenced snapshots of
spectators
lining the Doo-Dah parade (which that year, police and Apanel agreed,
attracted
more than 50,000 viewers) at fixed intervals. Apanel then counted every
single person in those pictures and extrapolated density levels
applicable
to the New Year's parade. Although he claimed that for two-thirds of
the
route, the shorter Doo-Dah parade had as much or more spectator
density,
he multiplied the density level by two when estimating the Tournament
of
Roses parade crowd. By factoring in the fans sitting in the reserved
bleachers
and the longer route of the Tournament of Roses parade, Apanel insisted
that the police estimate was way off that no more than 360,000 people
could
have attended the parade in 1983, or about one-fourth of the police
estimate.

Robert Gillette, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, did a
little
figuring of his own. He measured the depth of the standing room area at
23 feet, marked on one side by the blue line behind which all
spectators
must stand and on the other side by the buildings at the back of the
crowd.
Multiplying this standing room area by the 5.5-mile parade route,
Gillette
calculated that the parade route provided 1,336,000 square feet (not
all
of this space was occupied, since attendees toward the back can and
often
do move about freely, but Gillette did not factor in unused space). He
then assumed that each attendee occupied two square feet (one foot
thick
and two feet wide). Dividing the 2 square feet into the 1,336,000
square
feet, Gillette arrived at the figure of 668.000 as the maximum number
of
people that the Tournament of Roses parade route could accommodate.

Other skeptics have arrived at different estimates, including
some
Pasadena-based
California Institute of Technology professors, who put a half million
as
the maximum number. Guerin, however, feels confident in his
approximation
and notes that in the helicopter, he is always amazed how fluid the
pedestrian
traffic is. In the early morning, it always looks like attendance is
bad,
but somehow new people keep appearing. Guerin added that although the
official
Pasadena estimate is hardly precise, it's as good a guess as anyone
else's
and that police don't receive any kind of special training or education
in crowd estimation.

Imponderables spoke to New York officials about how they make
crowd
estimates. In most cases, the task is left to the local police precinct
where the parade takes place.

The police make stabs at accuracy, but it is no more a science
in
New
York than in Pasadena. The most popular technique for Fifth Avenue
parades
(such as the St. Patrick's Day parade or Columbus Day parade) is to
count
the number of rows of spectators behind the blue wooden barriers that
are
placed on each side of the street. Each barrier is fourteen feet long.
Assuming that the population behind each barrier will reflect the
parade
route as a whole, the police estimate how many spectators fit into the
square footage available in essence, they duplicate the methodology of
Doo-Dah founder Apanel without using photographs, and simply assume
that
density levels will not vary greatly at different points in the parade
route.

Another, more ingenious method of estimating crowd size is by
examining
the quantity of artifacts they leave behind. To say it less delicately,
one way of counting a crowd is to weigh how much garbage it leaves
behind.
Since sanitation trucks are weighed electronically at the disposal
site,
it has always been an easy matter to measure the amount of debris left
after New York's famed ticker tape parades down the "canyon of heroes."

Counting garbage is not a perfect scheme for measuring crowd
sizes,
however. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, for example, is notorious
for its large attendance but pitiful lack of garbage, which rarely
surpasses
ten tons. Even the Tournament of Roses parade weighs in at around a
measly
forty tons a year. These parades are pikers compared to the ticker
tapes,
but the latter have the advantage of artificial inflation in recent
years,
some parade committees have actually imported shredded paper from out
of
the city to be thrown at passing heroes. Not much ticker tape is thrown
anymore. Computer printouts are the replacement. More and more
skyscrapers
are "climate controlled," with windows incapable of being opened,
reducing
the opportunities for many to contribute to the mess. All of these
factors
make it difficult to correlate crowd size with quantity of garbage, but
the New York City Department of Sanitation is besieged with requests
for
the garbage count, and most observers feel there is some connection
between
the amount of paper thrown and the frenzy and enthusiasm of the
celebrants.

For Casey Kasem fans everywhere, here are the top five garbage
parades
of all time in New York:

By all accounts, the V-J Day parade was the most spirited and most
heavily
attended.

Every single source I spoke to about this Imponderable
conceded
that precision in estimating crowds was impossible and the task itself
of less than earth-shattering importance. None was trained to execute
this
task. And all of them felt that newspapers and politicians would force
them to continue with the madness.